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Canadian University Music Review
Canadian University Music Review
God, Desire, and Musical Narrative in the Isorhythmic
Motet
Susan Fast
Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Studies by
Canadian Scholars Volume 18, numéro 1, 1997
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92
Article abstract
This article examines the relationship between late Medieval
narrative structure in French literature and music (specifically
the isorhythmic motet) and how that structure was shaped by
deeply held beliefs within Medieval culture, including the idea
that a person's identity and desires were directed by God. A
detailed analysis of the motet De bon espoir/Puis que la douce
rousee/Speravi by Guillaume de Machaut is made to support the
argument.
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Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique des
universités canadiennes
ISSN 0710-0353 (print)
2291-2436 (digital)
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Cite this article
Susan Fast "God, Desire, and Musical Narrative in the
Isorhythmic Motet." Canadian University Music Review 181
(1997): 19–37.
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GOD, DESIRE, AND MUSICAL NARRATIVE
IN THE ISORHYTHMIC MOTET
Susan Fast
In her book The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers, Sylvia Huot
asks with respect to the work of Guillaume de Machaut, "where is the possibility for a legitimate and fruitful love, or for a learned and respectable love
poetry? what sort of literary language and what sort of music are appropriate
to the discourse of love?"1 Huot, a literary historian, is perhaps unaware that
until recently the question about a music appropriate to the discourse of love
would not have been entertained by most musicologists, since in order to
attempt an answer we must engage in what John Van Engen calls "the subjectivity inevitably present in all interpretation";2 we must look at the relationships
between notes and then beyond, to what those relationships divulge about the
people who made them, or the society in which those relationships made sense,
questioning, in other words, the musical choices made archaeologically. While
there is now much critical engagement of this sort about music from the
Renaissance onward, it has barely touched studies of Medieval music. As Don
Randall pointed out a few years ago:
The prevailing view of early music history ... has strongly discouraged ...
largely on the grounds of anachronism, the enterprise most likely to undermine it: criticism. Criticism was the invention of later ages and was to be
practised, therefore, only on later music.3
This has not deterred scholars of the Middle Ages in fields other than music.
Medieval literature is being rethought in light of recent developments in
1 Sylvia Huot, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception,
Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 241. For assistance with the
present paper, I extend my thanks to Simon Wood, who prepared the musical examples. This paper was
read at the meetings Border Crossings: Future Directions in Music Studies, University of Ottawa, 8-11
March 1995; the 23rd Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music, University of Southampton,
5-9 July 1996; and at a graduate student colloquium at the University of Western Ontario, 8 March
1997.1 am grateful to those who were present for their useful comments and to the anonymous reviewers
of the essay for their valuable suggestions for improvement.
2John Van Engen, "Agenda Paper: The Future of Medieval Studies," in The Past and Future of
Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), 4.
3 Don M. Randall, "Music and Poetry, History and Criticism: Reading the Fifteenth-Century
Chanson," in Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson, ed. Lewis Lockwood and Edward
Roesner (New York: American Musicological Society, 1990), 57. Interestingly, the charge of anachronism
applies to formalist analyses as well. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson addresses this issue in his article "Machaut's
Rose, lis and the Problem of Early Music Analysis," in Music Analysis 3 (1984): 9-28, in which he defends
the application of analytical techniques from later periods to Medieval music, stating that "analyses of
surviving works, while taking careful account of what we know of period techniques, have to proceed
from, and to seek to explain, what we currently see and hear in the music" (p. 9).
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literary and feminist theory4 and even the methodology and aims of that most
traditional enterprise in which Medievalists engage, philology, are being
questioned in the wake of postmodern thought.5 But in music, aside from a few
exceptions, those practising criticism have dealt with repertories after 1400,
and the examples from before 1600 are few and far between.6
My project here is to ask Sylvia Huot's question of what may, at first, seem
a rather unlikely genre of Medieval music for this inquiry, the isorhythmic
motet, and in so doing to echo Randall's plea that "some kinds of criticism of
works from what we have been pleased to call the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance will repay our efforts by opening new aspects of these works to
us."7 It may also help those outside the discipline of music — for example
literary scholars such as Huot and others who engage themselves with
Machaut's poetry but not with that poetry as it is set to music — appreciate
how integral a part of the cultural fabric music is.8
sfc
*
*
I say that the motet is an unlikely site for this inquiry because the Medieval
conception of music as sounding number is perhaps nowhere better played out
4 A special issue of Speculum was recently devoted to "Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender,
Feminism" (April 1993); several interesting volumes of criticism have appeared in the last few years,
among which are The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991), which includes essays under the rubrics of "New Philology," "Literary
Anthropology," and "Authority and History"; Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie
A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), With a useful
introductory essay entitled "Critical Theory and the Study of the Middle Ages," and further essays that
explore aspects of deconstruction, intertextuality and reader-response theories with respect! to medieval
literature.
5 David Huit, "Reading it Right: The Ideology of Text Editing," in The New Medievalism, 113-30.
See also The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s, ed. William D. Paden
(Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1994).
6 Randall has also written "Dufay the Reader," in Music and Language, Studies in the History of
Music (New York: Broude Brothers, 1983), 38-78. The first part of Leo Treitler's article in Musicology
and Difference focuses a discussion of gender dualities in music on the different ways in which
Gregorian (depicted as masculine) and Old Roman chant (feminine) have been written about. Ultimately, however, Treitler is wary of a criticism, not only of "early," but any music, that deals with musical
meanings, believing this to be too arbitrary. See "Gender and Other Dualities of Music History," in
Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 23-42.
John Shepherd has made a substantial analysis of plainchant as he perceives its structure to imply the
"world sense of early medieval [feudal] society" in "Functional Tonality: A Basis for Musical
Hegemony," in Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 96-127. See also
my "Bakhtin and the Discourse of Late Medieval Music Theory," Plainsong and Medieval Music 5, no.
2 (Fall 1996): 175-91. Gary Tomlinson's Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of
Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) is an exemplary work of criticism, as is Bruce
Holsinger's essay, "The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music
of Hildegard of Bingen," Signs 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 92-125, and the paper he delivered at the
November 1995 meeting of the American Musicological Society, "Desiring Léonin: Music and Sexual
Dissidence in Northern France, ca. 1200."
7 Randall, "Music and Poetry," 73.
8 Leo Treitler has recently lamented the "lack of awareness within Medieval studies outside my
field about the historical materials that abound in the domain of music and about what the interpretation
of those materials can contribute to the understanding of medieval culture." "Inventing a European
Music Culture — Then and Now," in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, 344.
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than in this genre, which has given rise to a discourse focused in large part on
matters related solely to the complexity of its structure. In The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the motet is described as "a rigorously
logical concept of marvellous daring" designed "proportionately to unfold,
demonstrate and articulate the fundamental numerical theme given by the
tenor."9 The metalanguage of isorhythm (and isomelism, isoperiodicity) used
to articulate the structural principles of the motet is a product of modern, not
Medieval, thought, developed by German musicologists who were pioneers in
the formalist thinking about music that has so dominated the discipline in this
century.10 The other peculiarity of this genre, its polytextuality, has recently
begun to be subjected to sympathetic analysis, mostly by literary historians,
but it was long dismissed as part of the intellectual elitism of the composers,
who were thought to revel in complexities that were beyond the understanding
(or hearing) of most. Christopher Page has begun to dismantle this view of the
motet for the thirteenth century, offering a new translation and reinterpretation
of the only Medieval treatise to deal with the subject, Johannes de Grocheio's
De musica. Page challenges the idea that the makers and consumers of thirteenth-century motets were a small intellectual elite, thereby recovering for the
genre a wider sphere of influence, which is significant for the analysis I give
below.11
Sylvia Huot has done much in her recent work towards bringing us closer
to an understanding of polytextuality in the motet. Beyond linking the poems
of the upper voices with the tenor thematically, which musicologists had
already done, albeit in a rather simplistic fashion, Huot argues for a thoroughly
intertextual interpretation, for reading one text in light of the other, so that their
meanings are intertwined. She proposes that through polytextuality "tensions
that lie beneath the surface of romance or chanson are hidden no longer: in the
juxtaposition of voices and registers the interplay of conflicting emotions and
perspectives has become a poetic principle."12
The work that has been done concerning the correlation between text and
music in the motet has been centred on structural analysis of poetry and
music,13 or on an examination of "word painting," both in terms of supplying
local examples of the relationship between words and notes,14 and also more
9 Ernest Sanders, "Motet," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols., ed.
Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980) 12:619-20.
lOThe term was coined by Friedrich Ludwig in 1904 and his ideas on the isorhythmic motet were
subsequently taken up first by Heinrich Besseler and then Jacques Handschin. Sanders, "Isorhythm,"
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 9:353.
11 Christopher Page, "Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New
Translation," Plainsong and Medieval Music 2(1993): 17-41. See also Page's discussion of the audience
for the motet in his book Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
12Sylvia Huot, "Polyphonic Poetry: The Old French Motet and Its Literary Context," French Forum
14 (1984): 275.
13 See for example Georg Reichert, "Das Verhàltnis zwischen musikalischer und textlicher Struktur
in den Motetten Machauts," Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 3, no. 4 (1956): 198-216. Reichert is
concerned with the correspondence of the form of the texts with the isorhythmic structure.
14For examples see the dissertation by Beverly Jean Evans, The Unity of Text and Music in the Late
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broadly to determine how the large-scale structure of a piece correlates to the
meaning of the text(s). A recent example of the latter is Margaret Bent's
analysis of Machaut's Faus samblant motet, in which she links the idea of
deception embodied by faux semblant (the character of "false seeming" in the
Roman de la rose) to the textual theme of the tenor, which is taken from the
biblical story of Jacob, full of double meanings and deception, and to the
duplicitous manner in which the musical structure can be construed.15 Bent's
brilliant analysis is, however, based almost exclusively on numerological
decoding (the total number of breves in the piece, how many of these appear
in each talea and the varied way in which they can be grouped together within
and among taleae on the basis of rhythmic patterns; the number of words in
each poem, how these are distributed with respect to the music, and so on). It
and other studies of this kind are hermeneutic insofar as they try to account for
the way in which certain musical gestures seem to reflect the semantic content
of the texts, but they do not attempt to interpret beyond this, to try to explain
how the musical/textual matrix reflects in general on cultural practices. I wish
to propose a different paradigm through which we might understand the motet,
which takes Huot's intertextual analyses of the poetry as one point of departure,
formalist analysis of the music as another, and which is then framed by theories
of Medieval narrative structure and beyond to deeper structures within late
Medieval French culture. I will begin with an explication of the latter, and then
move to a close reading of one of Machaut's motets, De bon espoir/Puis que
la douce/Speravi, through which this homology between musical and narrative
structure can be drawn. During the analysis I will return to Huot's question of
the appropriateness of this musical discourse to love. I should state at the outset
that what I intend to do in this analysis is simply to "open a hermeneutic
window" as Lawrence Kramer has said;16 obviously, much more extensive and
refined analysis is required.
*
*
*
Historians of Medieval literature pointed some time ago to two related structural phenomena widely found in Medieval narrative, which they have termed
narrative interlacing and bifurcation or bipartite (or tripartite, etc.) structure
respectively.17 Both techniques are found, as William Ryding points out, in
Chrétien de Troyes' romance Le conte du Graal, a few examples of which will
suffice to acquaint the reader with the manner in which these techniques
Thirteenth Century French Motet: A Study of Selected Works From the Montpellier Manuscripts
Fascicle VII (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1983), which discusses the importance of
the text's structure in determining musical structure; and also some of the essays in Musik und Text in
der Mehrstimmigkeit des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Kassel: Bârenreiter, 1984), which deal in various
ways with the intersection between text and music in this repertoire.
15Margaret Bent, "Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut's Motet 15," Early
Music History 10 (1991): 15-27.
16 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: Uni verity of California
Press, 1990), 5-11.
17 The history of scholarly views concerning the structure of Medieval narrative is summarized by
William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 9-37.
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operate (I should note that I might have chosen from many other Medieval
works, both earlier and later, which exhibit these techniques — this one is not
the earliest, the best, or otherwise unique). In the first part of this tale, a central
character, Perceval, leaves home in order to become a knight. This event sets
into motion a series of episodes which Ryding describes as follows:
Perceval leaves his mother to go in search of the chivalric life and Arthur's
court. She falls to the ground, but neither Perceval nor the reader knows that
she has died until after he leaves the Grail Castle, when his cousin accuses
him of causing his mother's death. Again, after leaving home, he breaks in on
a girl in a tent, eats her cakes, kisses her, and then rides off. Later, after talking
to his cousin and learning of his mother's death, he meets the same maiden
being brutally treated by her jealous lover, L'Orguelleus de la Lande.18
What Ryding doesn't mention in his description is that L'Orguelleus de la
Lande is jealous because he has learned of Perceval's earlier visit to the
maiden's tent, and has accused her (it would seem mistakenly) of making love
with him. 19 This information ties her miserable treatment by L'Orguelleus
directly to Perceval and his episode with her at her tent.
The examples of narrative interlacing continue, as Ryding explains:
Two other matters are begun before Perceval's arrival at the Grail Castle: He
becomes involved with Blanchefleur, defends her against Clamadeu des Iles,
and spends a night in her arms; secondly, he arrives at Arthur's court and then
leaves to win the armor of the Red Knight. These matters too are resolved
[only] after the visit to the Grail Castle.20
In fact, after he spends the night with Blancheflor, he leaves to find out what
has happened to his Mother. On his way to her, he learns that she has, indeed,
died, and he abandons his journey. In a remarkably complex segue, Chrétien
returns to the Blancheflor episode: as Perceval turns back from the journey to
18lbid., 140.
19Chrétien de Troyes, Le conte du Graal, éd. Charles Mêla (Paris: Librarie générale française,
1990), 279-81.
L'Orgueilleus: "Ecoute-moi donc et tu vas entendre l'histoire.
Récemment encore, j'étais allé aux bois
et j'avais dans un pavillon de tente
laissé la demoiselle que voici.
Je n'aimais d'autre créature qu'elle.
Voilà que d'aventure survint,
en ces lieux, un jeune Gallois.
J'ignore tout du chemin où il allait,
mais il réussi à lui prendre un baiser
de force, elle-même me l'a avoué,
et si c'est bien malgré elle qu'il lui a pris un baiser,
ne devait-il pas, de toutes façons, faire d'elle ensuite sa volonté?
Oh, oui, personne n'irait jamais croire
qu'il lui a pris un baiser sans lui faire plus,
car une chose entraîne l'autre."
20Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative, 141.
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his Mother, he sees a falcon kill a goose, who sheds three drops of blood on
the white snow. "The blood and the snow together," Chrétien writes, "reminded
Perceval of the fresh hue on his beloved [Blancheflor's] face and he mused
until he forgot himself."21
There is a larger narrative jolt in this récit, however, which comes when
Perceval as central subject is completely dropped "at the height of his glory"
as a knight22 and a new subject, Gawain, is introduced and developed instead:
Chrétien makes this transition, if one can call it that, by telling the reader "Des
aventures qu'il [Gawain] a trouvée, vous allez m'entendre parler un long
moment."23 Perceval does not appear again for another fifteen hundred lines
of text,24 when he is brought back by the narrator who says that he will now
stop Gawain's story and take up Perceval's again:
De mon seignor Gauvain se test
Li contes ici a estai
Si Parlerons de Perceval,
Perceval, ce conte l'estoire.
A si perdue la mémoire
Que de Deu ne li sovient mais.25
And indeed, Perceval's story is now resumed.
Not so long ago, the characteristics of narrative interlacing and bipartite
structure were considered a great failing of much Medieval literature, but these
texts are viewed more sympathetically now as adhering to organizational
principles different from teleologically-conceived modern narrative, based on
Aristotelian principles, that followed in the sixteenth century.26 Narrative
interlacing attempts to pull the various episodes of a piece into a contemporaneous whole, to make it seem as though they are occurring simultaneously,
not sequentially.27 In Le conte du Graal the significance of the bipartite
structure has been described as an expression of "contrasting and deliberately
juxtaposed tableaux, Gawain's adventures being purely mundane, those of
Perceval informed by a contrasting ethical and religious spirit."28 It has been
remarked that "the full meaning of [the characters'] experiences depends on
their juxtaposition with those of the others" in this kind of narrative technique.29 Early Medieval stories such as Beowulf, La vie du Saint Alexis and
Chretien's other narratives operate on a similar structural principle,30 but it
became a tendency "especially from the thirteenth century on"31 and almost
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Le conte du Graal, 345.
24Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative, 141.
25Quoted in ibid., 141-42.
26Ibid., 9-10.
27 Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire
(New York: New York University Press, 1989), 119.
28Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative, 27.
29lbid., 152.
30Ibid., 25-27.
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exclusively in France. This is, of course, the precise historical moment and
locale for the birth of the motet.
That there is more than one central subject in Le conte du Graal is certainly
interesting: in fact, Perceval and Gawain are by no means the only subjects in
this narrative — many others come into play in this story as well — and again,
one senses that it is through the development of one character that we come to
understand another one more fully. But the literary historian Evelyn Birge Vitz
points to a phenomenon that is perhaps of greater consequence, the presence
of a force we might not initially recognize as a true subject, but must surely be
so considered: God.32 Each action of the narrative is controlled by God's will,
or what God desires to have transpire. For example, Perceval's Mother pleads
with him not to become a knight, arguing that he is her only consolation, that
God has left her no other joy: "Vous étiez la seule consolation, le seul bien qui
me restrait, car je n'avais plus personne des miens. Dieu ne m'avait rien laissé
d'autre qui pût faire ma joie et mon bonheur."33 When a town is ravaged by
hunger after battle, a ship carrying food and other provisions arrives, "as God
pleases" safely to aid those affected: "un coup de vent avait chassé en mer un
chaland, qui avait sa charge de blé et qui était rempli d'autres vivres, et Dieu
a voulu qu'il aborde intact et sauf devant la citadelle."34 When Gawain's
adventures break off and Perceval's story is resumed, he is found contemplating his five-year neglect of God, after which he turns to a holy man to repent
for this sin, and learns from the Sage that he has only been watched upon by
God during this time his mother had prayed to God on his behalf: "si elle ne
t'avait recommandé à Dieu Notre Seigneur, sache-le! Mais sa prière eut une
telle vertu que Dieu t'a pour elle regardé, te préservant de la mort et de la
prison."35 Aside from controlling the action in these ways, God is simply a
constant presence in this story, His name is evoked in almost every line: "for
the mercy of God," "in God's name," "so help me God," making it impossible
to forget what a powerful and omnipresent force God was in Medieval society.
As Vitz points out, we might dismiss these references to God as nothing more
than rhetorical figures, but she urges
that we take seriously the Medieval cliche.... In other words, this text is, at
some level, explicitly God's story, God's work; this mysterious plot, these
events are God's miracles. God is not only its author, but its true subject. It is
He whose will — whose desire, whose object — determines the action.36
It should not be surprising for this to be the case in a profoundly Christian
society; that even a story that does not in any direct way involve a sacred theme
should be in the end completely regulated by the divine, should have as its
ultimate subject God. This omnipresence of God in Medieval life and thought
31 Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology, 100.
32 Ibid., 117-20.
33 Le conte du GraaU 57.
34 Ibid., 191.
35 Ibid., 451.
36Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology, 118.
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had an effect not only on the shape of narrative, but also on the way in which
characterisation of human subjects was made, which Vitz argues is more on a
vertical than a horizontal axis. Medieval characters are described as having
certain qualities that liken them to past figures who are held up to be models
and icons, to Saints or the church Fathers, for example; there is little interest
in qualities that set someone apart, that make them individual, deviant, aberrant, that depart from the norm in some way, which was to become central to
characterization in modern literature. As Vitz says with respect to this type of
characterization:
the influence of Christianity is, without any doubt, significant. In particular
psychology in this period is not yet secularized: it is hardly distinct from
theology. Indeed, the men who write about "psychology" — that is human
nature, the faculties, the appetites—are primarily theologians. And their basic
concern is not with individuation — horizontal differentiation among individuals — but with salvation and damnation, the rise and fall of souls, their
vertical movement with relation to God. And this basic orientation seems to
have pervaded almost all Medieval thinking about human character and
change, psychological movement is either exaltation or abasement... it is
progress or regress ...37
Vitz also links the treatment of desire and causality in Medieval texts to the
regulation of the narrative by God. Medieval characters are certainly motivated
by desires, which she defines broadly as "that dissatisfaction or need, on the
part of a character, which provides narrative stimulus or 'causal energy' in the
text,"38 but their desires are dealt with in fundamentally different ways than in
modern narrative. Vitz suggests that Medieval authors drew, probably subconsciously, on the Augustinian model in which "causality... is essentially a divine
prerogative ... human causality is never anything but 'secondary.'"39 While
characters in Medieval narrative may be motivated by desires of their own,
how these desires are satisfied (or not) is not under the individual's control.
*
*
*
The motet De bon espoir/Puis que la douce/Speravi by Guillaume de Machaut
conforms to our expectations of the ars nova motet in many respects (the score
is reproduced here in full).40 It is for three voices, all of which are isorhythmic.
The upper two voices have French, secular texts and the tenor, textless save
for an identifying rubric, is taken from a piece of plainchant.
As has been pointed out by others, the themes of the triplum and duplum
poems correlate: they explore one of the central ideas of amour courtois, the
37 Ibid., 19.
38Ibid., 176.
39Ibid., 179.
40 This analysis is based on the edition by Leo Schrade, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth
Century, vol. 3, (Monaco: Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 119-22, copyright, Éditions de l'OiseauLyre, S.A.M., Monaco, 1977. The score is reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher. Readily
available translations of the texts can be found in David F. Wilson, Music of the Middle Ages: An
Anthology for Performance and Study (New York: Schirmer, 1990), 216.
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unrequited lover who chooses to suffer through continued loyality to his lady,
the object of his desire. It has been remarked by Gilbert Reaney how the word
in the tenor (speravi — I have hoped) "fits very well" with this theme since
amorous hope drives the protagonist of the triplum poem.41 This remark
provides a good starting point for further analysis of the three texts and their
interrelationships. The poem of the triplum describes a subject who expresses
overwhelming desire for a lady who refuses his love; he relies on Hope to
comfort him in this situation as he has done in the past, but is so stricken by
love this time that he feels he might lose the comfort of Hope altogether. The
poem of the motetus offers a different view: here there is also great amorous
desire, but no overt refusal on the part of the woman. The subject of this poem
suffers from "an amorous desire" that his lady has "graciously made to enter
[his] heart" and he wants "to suffer humbly." Hope is not brought into the
picture, but Humility is twice invoked.
The tenor comes from a chant for the first Sunday after Pentecost (Psalm
12); the subject of this text does not fit with the upper-voice texts so much as
it contrasts the amorous hope of the triplum with hope in God, as Kevin
Brownlee has pointed out.42 This subject rejoices in, sings about, his hope; here
there is no suffering or despair, only celebration that springs from the fulfilment of desire. But we might also speculate on the interconnection among the
representations of desire that are made. Returning to Vitz's observations about
desire and causality in Medieval literature, we can note that in this context too,
divine will is represented as that agent with the potential to satisfy the
protagonist's desire and that this power does not lie with the subjects of the
triplum and duplum poems. Further, the tenor text suggests that the fulfilment
of desire can come by two means: either God can allow the protagonist to have
his lady, or the protagonist can abandon his desire for earthly love and find
fulfilment in his love for God instead.
It is the heroic quality of long suffering that is being celebrated in these
poems, in a way that is similar to other poems in this genre. Interestingly,
Christopher Page is critical of recent studies of individual motets that have,
instead of dealing with the structure of the music, considered the relationship
among the texts, acknowledging, for example, a thematic correlation between
tenor text and those of the upper voices, or between text(s) and music. He
argues that much of the poetry expresses generic sentiments and offers an
analysis of the thematic correspondences between a triplum and motetus poem
which, he reveals at the end of the analysis are taken from two different
41 Gilbert Reaney, Guillaume de Machaut (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 51.
42Kevin Brownlee, "Machaut's Motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose: The Literary Context of
Amours qui a le povoir/Faus samblant m'a deceu/Vidi Dominum" in Early Music History 10 (1991):
13-14. Alice V. Clark has also made an important observation with respect to the thematic interrelation
of texts in Machaut's motets. She has determined that many of the motet tenors derive from chants for
Lent and Holy Week which, she says "is significant, especially in an amatory context: the sorrow and
pain of the lover is explicitly compared to that of Jesus on the cross, the narrator's passion with the
passio of Christ. The comparison may be either straightforward or ironic, or both at once, but I believe
it must be intentional" (paper given at the American Musicological Society national conference,
Pittsburgh, 1992). My thanks to Dr. Clark for providing me with a copy of her paper.
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31
motets.431 find the literary analyses of motets by Huot and others valuable in
many ways, and bring up Page's point here only because it is not necessarily
a negative criticism: it resonates perfectly with Vitz's comment concerning
depictions of character in the Middle Ages, namely, that there is a certain
generic quality to these depictions, that it was less important to emphasize the
individual, more important to be depicted as a character type. We will find this
to be the case again in the musical setting of these poems.
In this motet, then, there are really three different, but thematically related,
subjects, one of which illuminates, enhances or redirects the meaning of the
other in a manner characteristic of much Medieval narrative. There is also a
mixture of the sacred with the profane, the presence — the omnipresence we
will soon see — of God in this récit about secular love. Significantly, it is only
through the possibility of music that these characteristics of Medieval narrative
can be fully exploited. Through polyphony, the completely simultaneous
expression of these stories is possible as it is not in written poetry or prose,
despite the best efforts of interlacing by Medieval authors. However it is not
only this surface structure of the music, not only the simultaneity that is
important to note, but the musical details in which the narrative is most fully
played out. I would like to examine these now, beginning with the tenor voice.44
The complete text of the tenor voice presents a specific subject and this
subject is certainly important to the semantics of the composition, as was
pointed out above; but neither the complete text of the chant, nor the complete
melody were borrowed to make the tenor of the motet, only a fragment of each.
Because of this one can also posit the tenor as a more generalized divine
presence: the sacred foundation,45 the structural voice drawn from the stable
tradition of plainchant,46 a comforting manifestation of that presence, which is
literally connected to a larger whole, not only through the specific pitches of
the borrowed melody but also through its modality (mode V, with its final on
F, which is the same as that of the chant). This divine subject, God, asserts
power and authority over the other voices in musical terms, by moving at a
much slower rate rhythmically; it asserts stability by moving in stepwise
motion; it maintains its distance from the upper voices by never engaging in
their rhythmic or melodic gestures and by maintaining its own range, lower
than the other voices, while the upper voices sometimes cross and share
rhythmic material. Both Susan McClary and Bruce Holsinger have discussed
shared vocal or instrumental range within a piece as a metaphor for physical
intimacy;47 in this motet, there are two further ways in which such intimacy is
expressed: the upper voices share rhythmic material and through the act of
43 Page, Discarding Images, 87-88.
44A version of the chant can be found in the Graduate Triplex (Paris and Tournai: Abbaye
Saint-Pierre de Solemnes, 1979, 278.
45 Margaret Bent also points to the significance of the sacred tenor as the "musical and symbolic
foundation of the motet," in "Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number," 25.
46By this comment I do not mean to suggest that there was a completely unchanging body of
Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages; this was, of course, not the case.
47Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), 37; Bruce Holsinger, "Desiring Léonin."
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singing, the two texts merge and become one in several places (see below), all
of these devices we could posit, in answer to Sylvia Huot's question, making
this music "appropriate to the discourse of love." The distance between tenor
and upper voices is made more pronounced if the tenor is played on an
instrument instead of sung, which is the way pieces such as this are often
performed today (although Christopher Page makes a strong case for all the
voices being sung).48 It is striking that in the motets by Machaut and others
that make use of a secular tenor melody, this tenor "will usually be equal in
range and melodic motion to the other voices, forming with them an intertwining trio of equal voices,"49 suggesting a profound musical distinction in
character between secular and sacred subjects in this genre. An example of this
can be seen in Machaut's motet Trop plus est bele/Biauté paree/Je ne sui mie
certeins, which has a secular tenor (example l). 50
Example 1: Machaut, Trop plus est bele/Biaute paree/Je ne sui me certains, beginning.
Reproduced by kind permission of Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre.
The upper voices are borne through their relationship to the sacred tenor in
the first instance, since the pitches of that voice are given.51 The vertical
sonorities created between tenor and upper voices are almost always perfect
consonances, while intervals between the upper voices, and those that occur
between upper voices and tenor when the tenor is sustained, may be dissonant.
In other words, a change in pitch by the tenor occasions a movement to
consonance by all voices.52 While dissonance (or disharmony) is allowed to
exist between voices representing the secular world, and while they may create
48Page, "Machaut's 'Pupil* Deschamps on the Performance of Music: Voices or Instruments in the
Fourteenth-Century Chanson?," Early Music 5, no. 4 (October 1977): 484-91; idem, "The Performance
of Songs in Late-Medieval France: A New Source," Early Music 10, no. 4 (October 1982): 410-50.
49Wilson, Music in the Middle Ages, 261; Reaney makes the same point: when a secular song is
used as the tenor "the three voices blend much better....The huge length of the notes in the lower parts
is less apparent," Machaut, 54.
50The motet is found in Leo Schrade, éd., Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 2
(Monaco: Éditions de FOiseau-Lyre, 1956), 11. Copyright, Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, S.A.M., Monaco,
1977. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
51 This is not to promote the old theory of "successive" composition, which stated that each upper
voice must be consonant with the tenor first, and only secondarily with the other upper voice or voices.
See Leech-Wilkinson, "Machaut's Rose, lis..."
52There is a striking exception in measure 5 of the Schrade edition, in which the tenor sounds a G
against the motetus F.
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33
dissonance with the sacred tenor through their own movement, movement of
the divine voice can only lead to consonance. These upper voices, as was noted,
sometimes share the same range and rhythmic patterns, but never the same
melody. They maintain separate phrase structures, beginning and ending at
different times. The character of their melodies is also distinct, the motetus
often moving at a slower rhythmic pace than the triplum. But this, we must
remember, was a standard practice in the ars nova motet: the upper voice
characteristically moved more quickly than the motetus, and so this feature is
not unique to the piece under consideration. The rhythmic patterns of the upper
voices sometimes interlock; in fact, the rhythmic structure of the voices is
relatively static. There are a few different, short rhythmic patterns that are
repeated throughout the piece, more complex, but on the same order as the
earlier use of rhythmic modes. The furthest interconnection between these
subjects occurs with the use of hocket, when for a moment they must articulate
a single melodic idea as if they were one (mm. 112-14; 129-31; 146-48). So
while there is differentiation between these two voices, these two subjects,
there is also a sameness, a sameness between the two of them and between
these characters and others within this musical genre.
This similarity, I would argue, echoes the generalized characterisation of
subjects in Medieval narrative in several ways. Rhythmically and melodically
the voices have much in common: they are not terribly different from one
another, they are individuated only to a limited degree. The repetition of
rhythmic motives establishes the relatively narrow boundaries in which the
characterisation of these voices is going to take place. There is no breaking of
these boundaries by one or another of the voices in the name of individual
expression; no getting away from them in order to paint a particular word or
phrase of the text in the way that later music will.53 And the patterns and
relationships between these two voices occur in other motets as well. This is a
variation of patterns that have been established before — they are not deviant,
not individualized.
Furthermore, during a performance of the piece, we begin to hear the triplum
and duplum texts not as distinct, but as a single entity. Often we hear a phrase
from one text while the other pauses and vice versa, or a word from one text
may be interjected into the middle of a phrase from the other text. This
essentially produces a third text, one that is the aural combination of triplum
and motetus, which is highly impressionistic — for example, when the triplum
cadences at the end of the line "Et Souvenirs me moustroit la biaute, Le sens,
l'honeur, let pris et la bonté," the motetus part continues on with the word
"désir"; or the way in which we hear the triplum line "Pour mon las cuer faire
désespérer" coincidentally with the motetus word "desmesuree," with individual syllables of the latter word interspersed with the text of the triplum
53 Some scholars have found instances of word painting in the motet. In this work, for example, one
could point to the change in mensuration that occurs in the motetus, producing longer note values for
the text "une ardeur desmesuree" and again with "Je ne puis avoir durée"; but a third time that this
mensuration change occurs, the text does not correlate ("D'umblesse ne wet florir")- The changes in
mensuration also come in the middle of the lines of text, not at the beginning.
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voice. Since in this motet the two poems offer slightly different versions of the
same theme, their combination in the musical setting serves to blur distinctions
between the two even further. It is also a superb example of narrative interlacing.
The tenor is not only considered to be structural because it produces the
pitches on which the piece is based, but because it is organized isorhythmically.
It is this imposed rhythmic structure, absent in Gregorian chant, that links the
pitches of the tenor to the profane world, that makes it possible for the chant
fragment to coexist with the other voices in this context.54 It is also this
rhythmic structure that further develops the subjects and delineates relationships among them. The rhythmic pattern of the tenor in this piece is repeated
three times at integer valor (the original rhythm) and again three times in
diminution (rhythmic values cut in half). Based on this we can say that the
piece bifurcates — that it has a bipartite structure. The diminution in the tenor
(beginning at m. 103) does not coincide with a neat structural division of the
text in the upper voices — in fact the triplum has just begun a new phrase in
the previous measure; the duplum begins a new phrase the measure after the
diminution begins, and the rhythmic and melodic character of the upper voices
does not change until ten measures into the diminution section and then rather
violently with the introduction of hocket. But the tenor has changed its
character with the advent of diminution. This bears a similarity to the bifurcation of the narrative in Chretien's grail story in that "Gawain's adventures [are]
purely mundane, those of Perceval informed by a contrasting ethical and
religious spirit," or the bifurcation of another Medieval récit, The Life of Saint
Alexis. The first half of this story tells the Saint's biography, but the second
half deals with events that occurred after his death. Some literary historians
have explained this by
pointing out that author was not trying to write a biography in the ordinary
sense of the word; he was trying rather to paint the saint's life in the form of
a diptych, setting the imperfections and transitoriness of his earthly life over
against the lasting glory of the world beyond.55
I would propose that the opposite phenomenon has occurred in Machaut's
motet. When the diminution begins in the music, the tenor is still obviously
recognizable as the same character through its melodic and rhythmic organization, but it is evident from its transformation through diminution that it has
moved closer to the secular world of the upper voices by speeding up its
rhythmic movement to coincide more closely with theirs, representing, perhaps, movement towards the fulfilment of secular desire.
The sameness of the tenor, the constant repetition of a melodic and rhythmic
pattern, points to another link between Medieval narrative and this motet, that
541 believe this interpretation, albeit slightly modified, holds from the earliest rhythmicization of
chant, which occurred in the sacred polyphony of Notre Dame; this rhythmicization took place in order
that the chant and newly-composed voices might be able to move together more easily.
55 Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative, 26.
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35
is the lack of goal-directedness — and this is a difficult issue to address because
scholars such as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Sara Fuller have recently argued
effectively for the presence of goal-directed progressions in late Medieval
music, by which they mean the movement from imperfect to perfect
sonorities.56 Leech-Wilkinson shows convincingly how these progressions are
operative in Machaut's rondeau "Rose, lis," for instance (example 2).57
Example 2: Machaut, Rose, lis, beginning. Reproduced by kind permission of Éditions de
rOiseau-Lyre.
The opening phrase, as Leech-Wilkinson points out, has a clear teleology, the
tenor opening outward from C down to G and then to C below that, etc. He
argues that the recurring rhythmic pattern in the tenor helps to propel the line
forward, while harmonically, the points of arrival, for example what LeechWilkinson calls the G chord of measure two, also serve as points of departure:
the G chord is comprised of a third and a sixth, and it moves towards the F
chord at the beginning of measure four, which is comprised of perfect intervals,
a fifth and octave, and so on. Leech-Wilkinson discusses this particular harmonic movement, which he calls a II-I cadential pattern (a leading-tone
cadence in other parlance), in terms of movements from "desire to fulfilment,"
which he says:
might stand as a symbol for the very nature of Machaut's songs, perhaps even
fourteenth-century song as a whole. For the progression from conation to
resolution, from desire to fulfilment is fundamental... to the poetry and whole
tradition of Courtly Love.58
56Sara Fuller, "On Sonority in Fourteenth-Century Polyphony: Some Preliminary Reflections,"
Journal of Music Theory 30 (1986): 35-70 and Leech-Wilkinson, "Machaut's Rose, /«...."
57The rondeau is found in Leo Schrade, éd., Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 3
(Monaco: Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956), 152. Copyright Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, S.A.M.,
Monaco, 1977. Reproduced by kind permission of the publisher.
58Leech-Wilkinson, "Machaut's Rose, lis," 14.
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But the goal of courtly love poetry is not the fulfilment of desire, but rather
the lack of fulfilment. And while the goal-directed progressions in the rondeau
are undoubtedly there, if we turn back to the motet, the model of goal-directed
progression works less well. I would argue that in this piece, the directed
progressions are local — that they indicate momentary forward motion and not
large-scale teleological progression in the sense of later, tonal music. Part of
the reason for this is that directed progressions occur at the beginning and
middle of phrases as well as at the end and the fact that phrase endings are,
furthermore, made to seem like less of a "goal" because there is no real resting
point at internal cadences — once set in motion, the voices almost never pause
at the same time and there never occurs a point at which there is not at least
one voice sounding. But the biggest factor against the feeling of goal directedness is the controlling movement of the tenor, which gently rises and falls,
wave-like, within the narrow span of four pitches: F, G, A and B-flat, which
tends to thwart strong goal-directed harmonic movement. An analogy might
be drawn with the colotomic structure of gamelan music, the motet tenor acting
like the slow-moving balungan, or skeletal melody, the upper voices the
paraphrasing of this melody.59 In this particular motet, there is a further feature
which adds to this effect and that is that the upper two voices are also
isorhythmic. The upper-voice isorhythm coincides with the talea of the tenor;
it has been remarked that this helps to articulate, audibly, the structure of the
tenor.60 It also enhances the static quality of the composition: all three of the
voices are engaged in the continual repetition, the rearticulation of the rhythmic
foundation of the piece. The upper-voice isorhythm also, importantly, compromises the independence of these voices; it draws them into the power, the
authority of the tenor voice, of God, the controlling subject of this narrative.
All this contributes to the vertical and stationary as opposed to horizontal
movement of the music. Compare this with the way in which Evelyn Birge Vitz
describes the effect of narrative interlacing in a Medieval story:
Medieval narrative... is often surprisingly like a picture in that the episodes are
massed, visualizable motif clusters.... The unity of this work is more that of
the complex image than that of the récit.... We are invited by these "narrative"
texts to transcend their sequentiality to see them... as a great single spectacle.61
There is an especially intriguing moment in this regard in the diminution
section, when the upper voices resist the change introduced by the tenor, but
are eventually drawn into its power once again by altering their characters,
even as the tenor itself is being drawn into the faster rhythmic pace of the
secular world. As Vitz says: "In the case of the Medieval récit... we can be
said to have the intrusion of the idea of the divine perspective — for which
change does not occur — into the human experience of change."62
59 My thanks to Sandra Mangsen for suggesting this parallel.
60Sanders, "Motet," 626.
61 Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology, 119-20.
62lbid., 120.
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Sylvia Huot proposes that through polytextuality tensions concerning
Medieval conceptions of love that usually lie hidden, for example the juxtaposition of the ideals of courtly love with those of the more explicitly sexual
pastoral poems, and with divine love, are brought to the surface and articulated.
The motet "as a whole elaborates a psychology of love, dramatizing the
fulfilment, the prolongation, and the repression of desire,"63 in accordance, I
would add, with the principles that guided the structure of later Medieval
narrative, including the role of the divine and its effect on characterization. It
is a dialogic genre, in which the interplay among the subjects of the poems is
as important as the individual poems themselves. These tensions are not only
articulated poetically but musically: in the limited individuation of the upper
voices, their interaction, in the pull between sacred and secular musical characterization, in the musical characterization of the divine voice itself.
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between late Medieval narrative structure in French
literature and music (specifically the isorhythmic motet) and how that structure was
shaped by deeply held beliefs within Medieval culture, including the idea that a person's
identity and desires were directed by God. A detailed analysis of the motet De bon
espoir/Puis que la douce rousee/Speravi by Guillaume de Machaut is made to support
the argument.
63Huot, "Polyphonic Poetry," 275.